Monthly Archives: December 2016

Luke 2:1-20 In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. 2 This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. 3 All went to their own towns to be registered. 4 Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. 5 He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. 6 While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. 7 And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn. 8 In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. 9 Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. 10 But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: 11 to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. 12 This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” 13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, 14 “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!” 15 When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” 16 So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. 17 When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; 18 and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. 19 But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. 20 The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.

[sermon begins]

Generally speaking, we tend to think of full things being good things. Full refrigerators. Full bellies. Full bank accounts. Full lives. But full is not always good news. When you’re a laboring woman, “no vacancy” at a full inn is not the news you want to hear. The inn was full in Bethlehem. Mary “gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger because there was no room in the inn.”[1]

The Bible story doesn’t talk about the innkeeper. The one who has to deliver the bad news isn’t mentioned at all. But we imagine him. We are entertained by children playing the innkeeper during Christmas plays. One such story has made its way through the preaching circles over time. James Harnish, long-time pastor and writer, tells it this way:

“It’s the story of a nine-year-old boy named Wally. Wally was larger and slower than the other kids. All the kids liked him because he had a gentle heart and looked out for the smaller kids on the playground. Christmas was coming, and the children were preparing to act out the Nativity story. The teacher cast Wally in the role of the innkeeper because he would only have to remember one line. All Wally had to do was stand at the inn door and say, “No room. Go away.” Christmas Eve came and the play was going well. The shepherds didn’t trip on their bathrobes, and the wise men didn’t lose their gifts. The angels were managing to keep their wings attached and their halos in place. Mary and Joseph arrived at the inn and knocked on the door.

Right on cue, Wally shot back, “No room. Go away.” Joseph pleaded, “But sir, we have come a long way, and we are tired from the journey.” Again Wally called out, “No room. Go away.” With all the dramatic emotion the nine-year-old Joseph could muster, he pleaded, “But please, my wife is having a baby. Don’t you have a room where the baby can be born?” There was silence as Wally stared at Joseph and Mary. Everyone in the audience wanted to help Wally remember his forgotten line. Finally, the teacher called in Wally’s line from backstage. The young Joseph put his arm around Mary, which was a feat of dramatic training for a young boy. Sadly, they began to walk off the stage. But it was more than Wally’s kind heart could take. He shouted after them. “Wait! You can have my room.”[2] [end of Harnish story]

Wally’s story inspires a bit of wondering, kind of like that television show, “What Would You Do?”[3] What would we do as the innkeeper? He is sometimes imagined as an over-worked, short-tempered guy who snarls at the holy family. Other times he is depicted as humble and hospitable, offering the holy family what he has to offer. Regardless of tone, the end is the same. There is no room. But then there’s sort of a room…out in the back with the animals.

The question of Jesus and roominess has been on my mind about this Bible reading. Whether or not we cotton to the idea of an innkeeper – it’s fairly easy to become sentimental about Bethlehem. There are times for sentiment. Give me a candle, a dimmed sanctuary, start singing Silent Night and watch out. All I’m saying is that there may be room for more than sentiment in this beautiful, 2,000 year old story. In the Bible story, there is political unrest, a registration is ordered by Emperor Augustus while Syria is governed by Quirinius. The Emperor’s order results in a massive migration of people that uproots the holy family and sends them to Bethlehem where Jesus is born and laid in a manger because there was no room in the inn.

No room. Full. This makes me wonder about room for Jesus in our lives and in our world today. Room in the schedule. Room in the mind. Room in the heart. Room for compassion in the face of suffering. Room for Mary’s vision of God scattering the proud, casting the powerful from their thrones, and feeding the hungry.[4] Room for the glory of God.[5] Room for the peace proclaimed by the angel and the heavenly host.[6] Room for peace between nations, for peace between peoples.[7]

Roominess may be as much in short supply in our time as in the holy family’s time. Luke uses the word “room,” the Greek word kataluma.[8] This same word translated as “room” in Luke chapter 2 is translated as “upper room” in Luke chapter 22, describing the place where Jesus shares the Last Supper with the disciples at Passover.[9] Shares the meal that prefigures the meal we share in Holy Communion today.

Might Luke’s double use of kataluma mean that Jesus claims room where there once was none? Claiming room in spite of what was originally offered as available. Showing us from manger to upper room, from cross to grave to new life, that there are no lengths to which God will not go to get to us despite our best efforts to the contrary? Thomas Merton, a 20th century American monk, says it this way: “Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all, Christ has come uninvited…It is not the last gasp of exhausted possibilities but the first taste of all that is beyond conceiving.”[10]

You see, while we like to imagine ourselves as the innkeeper, as a gatekeeper of sorts, Jesus arrives uninvited. We can say, “No room, go away.” We can even be prompted by the people around us to say, “No room, go away.” We can point away from ourselves to an outlying manger that is removed from our everyday lives. We can think ourselves tucked into secure space away from a meddling God. Here’s the good news. Jesus is born anyway. Jesus, Emmanuel “God with Us,” arrives on the scene.[11] Jesus arrives in our world, our demented inn, as “a Savior who is the Messiah.”[12] Arriving in “mean estate,” of lowly birth and social class, God slips into skin and vulnerability.[13] With his fragile humanity, Jesus pursues a relentless ministry of love and life at the cost of his own.

Celebrating Jesus’ birth, we remind each other of God’s promise to come to us whether or not we think there’s room, of God’s promise to come to us uninvited through no virtuous merit or roominess of our own. We remind each other that God is born as this child, Christ the King, whom shepherds guard and angels sing; as this child, the Word made flesh, the babe, the son of Mary.[14] Thanks be to God and Amen.

[sermon begins after the Bible reading; Psalm 139 is at the end of sermon]

John 1:1-5, 14 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was in the beginning with God. 3All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. 14And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

[sermon begins]

Today, we’re drawn into the company of other people and the promises of God in a quieter way. Whether by temperament or circumstance we find a need for a reflective moment in the midst of this Christmas season. Christmas is a funny thing. It’s religious. It’s cultural. It’s festive. And it comes at the darkest time of the year. There’s some history in those developments. The church long ago tried to figure out how to exist alongside non-Christian celebrations that were rowdy and a lot of fun. So time of year and some of the trimmings were co-opted from those celebrations and remain today. I’m cool with that. Christianity has always lived in people’s lives while being translated by people’s lives. This means that all kinds of things make their way into the mix. It’s one of the things that I like about it.

There is also the story told in scripture. At Christmas, we celebrate a birth. Not just any birth…but a birth that shines light in the darkness, a birth that changes the world. God was active in history long before the birth of Jesus. Connecting the moment of this birth to all of God’s history, the gospel writer of John uses those powerful words, “In the beginning…”[1] These words that John uses to introduce the Word can also be heard in the very first verse of Genesis. [2] This connection draws a huge arc through time, space, and place, between the birth of creation to the birth of Jesus.

So while Luke spends time on the human details of shepherds and a manger, John spends time on the cosmic ones. Where Luke’s words are a simple story, John’s words elevate us into poetic mystery. We could leave it there, in those mysterious heights. We could keep at a distance this mysterious poetry that many discard as too heady or inaccessible. Except…except…John doesn’t leave it dangling out in the mystery of the cosmos, untouchable or inaccessible.

John brings the Word straight to the ground. “And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” This God who created…who made promises through Abraham, who brought freedom through Moses, who instigated challenge through the prophets, who gave guidance through kings…this God became flesh. A mysterious, inaccessible, cosmic God becomes a God that is part of our common humanity, through common flesh. God taking on flesh to join us in our humanity is the birth. Or, as John likes to put it, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us.”[3]

God living among us in Jesus is cause for reflection. Not simply because God showed up but because God entered human fragility. As John writes, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.” Light moving in the dark; day against night. This language may be poetic but we get it.

The darkness of someone we love living with a mental illness that is difficult to treat.

The darkness of grief and the confusion it brings to daily life.

The darkness of disease, acute or chronic, that seems to take up more space than anything else.

The darkness of unrest in the world that is a matter of life and death.

If we could sit and talk about the darkness, each one of us could name a way that it affects our lives or the life of someone we love. It is into this real struggle, this darkness, that Jesus is born. Jesus who continues to bring light that reveals God in the midst of the worst that life brings – a light that shines a defiant hope.

My mother gave me permission to tell a bit of her story. Many years ago, she married my first father in a romantic whirlwind. They honeymooned in Germany. While there, they picked up a set of Dresden angels. A few inches tall, white porcelain, graceful, and beautiful. Life was good and fun and grew to include five children. Those angels were set out in a bed of pine boughs at Christmastime every year to protect their wing tips in case they were knocked over. They surrounded a small porcelain baby Jesus.

Then my father got sick. Schizophrenia. A late psychotic break. Life wasn’t so good and we had to leave. As a single mother, mom kept putting those angels out. She remarried and every year those angels would go out. My stepfather died and the angels still stood, surrounding the baby Jesus. On Saturday, my mother and her third husband Larry took the angels to UPS. The angels are heading to my home, yet to arrive. Talking with her later in the day, she told me that she “burst into tears” when she got in the car after the UPS stop. She talked about how the angels were from a happy time and she was happy that I will have them. I’ve been thinking about the angels, my mom, first dad, siblings, and me – the good, bad, and ugly. I’ve also been thinking about this Longest Night worship. I’ve been thinking about people and their stories, about light in the darkness, about how we struggle with personal family struggles and with world-wide crises. I’ve also been thinking about God slipping on skin and how that makes all the difference in my own life and faith – bright times and broken times.

We don’t have to go very far to find what’s broken. But I’ve been thinking about how the speed of light travels to us whether from the next room or from a star a million miles away. We don’t move a muscle and light comes. God comes down to us, fleshy and fragile, right to the heart of things. We don’t move a muscle and God comes down to us. In the company of other people today, we remind each other that this is God’s promise to you, to me, and to world. Some days that promise feels like a fragile thread and other days it feels like a defiant hope. No matter our feelings on any given day, “darkness is not dark to [God]; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to [God].”[4] Amen.

Matthew 1:18-25 Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. 19 Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. 20 But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” 22 All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: 23 “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.” 24 When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, 25 but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.

[sermon begins]

I listen to a lot of people talk about their lives. While listening, I’m often struck by the magnitude of what someone says and the quiet, matter-of-fact way the story is shared. There’s the older gentleman in the seat next to mine on the airplane. The pilot was navigating around thunderstorms. The plane was shaking. I’m sure I was pale and looking worried. The gentleman next to me asked me if I was nervous. (I thought to myself, “Hah! Are you kidding me?!”) “Yes,” is what I said. He told me that he doesn’t get nervous in planes because it doesn’t get worse than being shot down in the Pacific during World War II and waiting days in the water to get picked up. The story was longer than that, of course. He told me bits and pieces, regaling in calm tones and stark detail. It had the quality of a story told many times. I could picture it without feeling a need to take care of him while he talked. He was open to curiosity and questions. His gift was one of distraction from my turbulence terror while he calmly shared his past.

The gentleman’s story, while unique in detail, is common in quality. How many of us get used to telling our strange tales that have become normal in our own lives but surprise other people in the telling. Jesus’ birth story is along this line for Christians. We tell a really strange tale, my friends. We celebrate it in sacred scripture. We sing about it. We pop it up in our homes. I confess I have several such home scenes myself. Joseph, Mary, and the baby Jesus surrounded by various configurations of animals, angels, shepherds, and magi. Wood, porcelain, and pottery that is carved, poured, and molded. Dioramas of faith that proliferate across the land and in my home.

In some ways, it’s such a simple story. So simple that even a child can tell it. Last week our young friends here at Augustana put on costume and learned their lines. They processed into the sanctuary and preached the story of Jesus through a narrated, live diorama. Their telling of this good news is a mash-up from the gospels of Luke and Matthew and appropriately called, “Simply Christmas.”

The gospel writer today keeps it super simple, too:

“Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engage to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.”

That’s it. Nothing flashy. But there is someone who gets a newsflash. Joseph. His betrothed is pregnant and he is not the father. If that’s not a kick in the gut that takes your breath away then I don’t know what would be. A man’s proudest agency is taken from Joseph. Confronted with the news, his initial plan is simple and legal. Dismiss Mary. Send her on her way quietly, saving her from public disgrace. Joseph is justified in his position. Not only in his own mind but in the eyes of the law. No harm, no foul. He is good to go. Simple and legal. Justified. Resolved. And then not so simple at all…

“But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream.”[1]

The angel, the Lord’s messenger, shows up thwarting Joseph’s justified resolve. I hate when that happens. When a good resolve swirls down the drain. Resolve feels good. It feels right. It is powerful, knowing what to do. Powerlessness? Not so much. And definitely not in the way a good resolve feels. Here’s a clue to part of the good news today. If there’s room for Joseph in the nativity story, then there is room for me, and there is room for you.[2]

There’s room for us in the Nativity story because Joseph is asked simply to stay and watch the story unfold. Oddly enough, he asks no questions of the angel in his dream and he’s given no understandable explanation. In essence, Joseph is told to take Mary as his wife and to name the baby conceived by the Holy Spirit, “Jesus.” That’s not a lot of information. In fact, it doesn’t amount to any information he can share with his friends as justification for staying with Mary, especially in light of the vague paternity. And, still, he obeys the angel.

He obeys without any knowledge of what this will mean. Just around the corner, what he can’t see is the visit from the magi. Those strange people from a faraway place who come to visit Jesus after he is born.[3] He can’t see the magi’s decision to thwart King Herod.[4] He can’t see King Herod’s edict to slaughter all the infant children less than two years old because they may or may not be the rumored Messiah.[5] He can’t see his and Mary’s escape and refuge in Egypt.[6] There’s so much that Joseph can’t see when he agrees to take Mary as his wife and name the baby Jesus.

James Harnish, a long-time Christian pastor, recalls a story from when he was in college. He went to see a professor with a very intelligent friend who had a lot of questions about his faith and was frustrated by the simplistic answers people gave him. His friend asked the professor, “How can I [follow] Christ when I don’t know all that it will mean?” The professor answered, “None of us knows all that it’s going to mean, but we know enough [to follow Jesus] and we spend the rest of our lives finding out what it means.”[7]

Joseph is obedient without an “i” dotted or “t” crossed. Some of us see ourselves in Joseph because, like him, our proudest self-agency is also taken away from us. We do not save ourselves. The name “Jesus” means “God saves” or “the Lord saves.” He will be born and named Jesus “for he will save his people from their sins.” Week-after-week we scratch the surface of what this means for us. Some of us wonder about intellectual problems raised by scripture that don’t jive with our experience or knowledge. Some of us struggle with the mystery and want it solved so that then we could have faith. Some of us are drawn to action on behalf of people who need help but don’t know where to start or how to keep going. For all of us in those moments, Joseph is our guy.

In light of Joseph’s lack of information, his obedience to the angel’s wild request is shocking, confusing, and disturbing.[8] If we let it, our familiarity with Jesus’ birth story means that our quiet, matter-of-fact way of telling it can oversimplify what God is doing all around us. God’s audacity in slipping into powerless, vulnerable skin is echoed by Joseph’s powerless, vulnerability as well as our own – the breadth of divine power revealed in the depth of divine, self-giving love. Like Joseph, we spend the rest of our lives figuring out what it means to follow Jesus. Like Joseph, we watch, wait, and wonder as Emmanuel, God with us, shows up and saves. Thanks be to God.

"Caitlin Trussell tells the truth of our Christian Faith with so much kindness, wisdom and conviction that I am always left wanting more. She's one heck of a preacher and speaker."

- Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber, founding pastor of House for All Sinners and Saints (ELCA Denver, Co), Published Author, International Speaker, patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/

"Caitlin Trussell approaches the gospel with the passion of an evangelist, the creativity of an artist, and the pastoral sensitivity of a loving parent. She unfailingly helps everyday Christians find God in their reading and hearing of the Scriptures and always finds a message that both challenges and comforts us with the good news of Christ. She is, in short, a superb teacher and preacher of the Word."

Rev. Dr. David Lose, President of Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia; and writer at www.davidlose.net

"Caitlin is one of the best preachers I’ve had the privilege of learning from. She has a gift to open new places in the mind and heart – for audiences new to the message of God’s love, and for “old hands” like me as well! With her breadth of experience – raising kids, nursing cancer victims, pastoring people in prisons and hospice, and graduating from seminary – she brings depth and wisdom.”